The White House on Thursday released a report about the decisions made regarding the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, including the bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 U.S. service members.
A different report containing classified material will be shared with members of Congress, which comes in response to requests from congressional committees, the White House said.
The 12-page report released to the public by the National Security Council summarizes the administration’s assessment of the withdrawal and largely blamed former President Donald Trump’s administration for the chaos that unfolded as U.S. troops were leaving and as Americans and Afghans evacuated from the country. The Taliban took over the country’s government and have remained in power.
“President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,” the report said.
When Trump took office in 2017, more than 10,000 U.S. troops remained in Afghanistan, the report said, and he continued to order drawdowns over his final year in office, bringing the total down to about 2,500.
But the Trump administration “provided no plans for how to conduct the final withdrawal or to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies,” the White House said. “President Biden had committed to ending the war in Afghanistan, but when he came into office he was confronted with difficult realities left to him by the Trump Administration.”
The White House said that the lack of communication from the Trump administration underscores why effective coordination for the transition process is critical “especially when it comes to complex military operations,” the summary stated. Fueled by Trump’s false claims that he had been denied re-election by rampant fraud, his administration largely refused to conduct traditional transition communications ahead of Biden taking office.
Biden and his team were “well aware of the challenges posed by withdrawing from a warzone” after 20 years, the White House said, and while the Trump administration left a target date for leaving Afghanistan, it provided “no plan for executing it.”
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby highlighted some of the report’s findings on Thursday and said that no U.S. agency had predicted the rapid collapse of the Afghan government and the Taliban’s takeover.
“No agency predicted a Taliban takeover in nine days,” Kirby told reporters at the White House press briefing. “No agency predicted the rapid fleeing of President [Ashraf] Ghani who had indicated to us his intent to remain in Afghanistan up until he departed on the 15th of August, and no agency predicted that the more than 300,000 trained and equipped Afghan National Security Defense Forces would fail to fight for their country, especially after 20 years of American support.”
Many critics of the withdrawal — including lawmakers from both parties — faulted the Biden administration for how it handled the pullout.
